Xavier Poisson Gouyou Beauchamp?

Re: i bet

I understand why you might say that, but take a look at some of the ReInvent videos from last year and I'm not sure that's true. One customer did a big preso on how they saved costs by ensuring they used an appropriate instance type. In my experience, much like in the days of virtualisation, folks hopelessly overestimate how much compute they thought they needed.

Anyway, the gist of this preso was that they'd rolled out a bunch of larger instances based on the assumption that the steady state compute would be pretty high. They experimented with T2 instances (bursty workloads) and found they were a lot more appropriate. This saved them something like 60%/70% per month on compute, which is generally the lion's share of the bill.

Properly monitoring what you roll out and sizing it appropriately should not be overlooked once you're live. If you remember it's a living thing that still needs care and attention (regardless of what cloud providers say) then that's half the battle.

Ha!

Given Hodge's chequered past, I don't put any weight in anything she says. Yes we know Government can't run IT projects for toffee, nothing new there. I just don't like the hectoring from a failed public servant.

Skewed Priorities

Judging from most banking IT horror stories, rather than pissing about with smartphone apps, HSBC should be sinking cash into making their back office and transactional systems something a little more modern and less breakable.

Too little too late

vCA is still pretty much a dead dodo. The world has moved on and (certainly in terms of public cloud), VMware hasn't kept pace. vCA has niche use cases such as DRaaS, but even now there are far more cost effective and elegant solutions such as Azure Site Recovery.

Best VMware stick to what they're good at, and leave "real" cloud to the big three, and I say this as a dyed in the wool VMware guy of many years standing.

Re: Difficult to see AWS winning on this one

As I understand it, that's just dropping in XenApp "Express" (AKA Crippled Mode, no doubt) to replace RemoteApp for application delivery. I was referring to Microsoft using XenDesktop for VDI in the cloud.

Difficult to see AWS winning on this one

Simply because Microsoft owns the desktop OS (in all but a name). On this basis, you'd expect Azure to have a much more flexible and cost effective solution simply because they can. AWS will always be subject to more stringent licencing constraints, or so you'd assume.

Rug Pullers

The timing of this is slightly fortuitous - I was only talking to a customer about RemoteApp last week. I never really liked it a whole lot, but to have it pulled so quickly really makes you stop and think about how you make decisions when you're using public cloud.

Basically, always have a fire exit to jump somewhere else at short notice.

RIP Lester

Truth

Another fine article Trev, good work. I'm inclined to agree with your viewpoint, and I've felt this way for a while. Other than NSX and VSAN, VMware has pretty much been in a holding pattern for quite a while. For someone who cut their industry teeth on Novell products, I'm starting to get a touch of deja vu.

No company in tech is too big to fail (not even Apple, given enough time) and I wonder if maybe there was a touch of arrogance at the top of the company a few years back that's contributed to the current state. Obviously revenues are still good, but once people think of their tech as "old hat", then it's only downhill from there.

I've pivoted from VMware and Hyper-V to public cloud - whether you like it or not, those are the skills you'll need for the foreseeable future if you want to get the mortgage paid off a bit quicker.

Slope Stars?

Plus needed for NSX

Actually it's a little bit crafty they say you need Ent+ before you can deploy NSX. This is because you need Distributed Switches and NSX sits on top of them.

I've never really understood why core networking functionality like VDSes were pushed into the top licence and agree that NSX should be part of a core bundle, but at the end of the day it's VMware's new money spinner so they have to bleed it dry with early adopters before making it more competitive for the great unwashed.

The brain drain continues

I know he says he'll still have some input, but moving from his VMware position to one at a VC seems a bit strange to me.

I found his attitude and presentations quite refreshing, he seemed genuinely engaged in NFV and NSX is a very good product. Shame VMware seem intent on keeping most gigs to themselves and not sharing the love with accredited partners, but that's another gripe entirely...

Shame, nevermind

You can't blame the founders for cashing out, but doing so to Oracle suggests Oracle's usual modus operandi of being licensing bastards and generally blocking innovation.

I used Ravello as a vExpert for free and found them brilliant to deal with, unfortunately now a "cloud of clouds" means Oracle have yet another stick to beat you with, rather than giving you a stick to navigate the shark infested oceans out there.

Re: Fork CyanogenMod?

I've had mixed results with my X trying some of these builds (which is to be expected, they are written by the community with no warranties implied etc.) such as the CM 13 build didn't get a GPS lock indoors (known issue) and the 12.x build by Master Awesome (nice name, BTW) is actually not bad and what I'm using right now. The triple slider thing doesn't always work properly, but that's no biggie.

I chose the X because the OPO was far too big. These 5.5" and 6" screens are just getting silly now, I don't want a tablet in my pocket. It's decent value for money, but I find the OxygenOS quite buggy. The big one for me was bluetooth streaming in the car kept breaking up and the metadata doesn't show (OOS is AVRCP 1.5, whereas most cars support only 1.3, I gather).

Hopefully things will ratchet down a bit now..

Now that Duncan has taken the wheel, here's hoping we can park the attack dogs and recognise that there is room in the storage market for lots of vendors, not just two high profile ones throwing grenades at each other.

Re: NIce try

I don't agree. The best solution, whether that's Nutanix, VSAN, Atlantis or anything else is down to customer requirements and budgets. No one is "better" than the other, they all have their pluses and minuses.

Re the VMware comment, they are in the business of abstracting tin and virtualising it. First with compute, then with networking and now with storage. So it goes. I don't see it as a "me too" strategy, but a logical continuation of what they've already done.

Tommy Li, love your work

Trolling for a headline

Sounds like Mr Cook is doing a Michael "Ryanair" O'Leary by making a statement he knew would draw headlines and so the buildup can begin to the iTelly or whatever it's going to be called.

I have a Samsung Note 2014 tab and a Smart TV, and I can tell him for a fact it's nothing like the 1970's, and I was there too. Mirroring my live Premier League footy from my tab to my telly on a Saturday is frankly a work of genius and seems like something else Apple have missed the boat on.

Collective Noun

Careful with that fault ticket, Eugene

Time will indeed tell if this has been fixed. I've had the same issue and I'm in the BL5 postcode for about that length of time. We've had a new SuperHub 2, we've had engineer calls, filters fitted, old lines terminated, lamps rubbed and various other excuses/fixes.

The engineer's parting shot was that this area is being upgraded to a faster speed, hence the outages. Sounds like a load of bollocks to me, but I'm too weary to argue anymore. That and plus every time I call customer services and someone in India answers, I just immediately hang up.

Always goes off the same time mind, round 1640 and 1940 every day, like clockwork. Even the main tool in the troubleshooting arsenal, turning it off and on again, makes no difference and you just have to wait it out.

I have to say that when it was NTL, we had two faults in about 10 years, so no grumbles from me. Stop pratting around with space ships Richard, and keep the home fires burning.